Pusha T on His Adidas Sneakers and Why the Next Four Years Will Be 'an Uphill Battle'

Most sneakerheads dream about the day they get to design a shoe with a brand on an official level. Even though Pusha T is very particular about his sneakers, designing a pair—or creating a relationship with a brand centered around designing footwear—is not something he ever wanted to do. When Adidas came to him with the idea of making a shoe together, he turned the brand down immediately.

"Initially I wanted to make apparel. I had this wacky idea putting cartel names on the back of soccer jerseys and they were totally not with it," he says with a laugh.

Adidas may have shot down that idea, but was still interested in getting him to do footwear. The team kept trying over and over. Rappers and hip hop artists have long created and maintained relationships with sneaker brands, but Pusha didn't know where he would fit in that long line of history. Especially if that relationship was going to be with Adidas—the brand that created one of the best musical partnerships of all time.

Adidas

"When you think about Adidas and you think about rap and you think about them just being classic, it's Run DMC," he says. "There has not been a greater marriage to me that actually has that classic feel. That's a lot to try to replicate, to put yourself in that context."

It wasn't until the NBA All-Star Weekend in 2014, when the team from Adidas threw a bunch of material swatches and silhouettes at him in the middle of a restaurant, that things changed. "It was too much for an All-Star Weekend at a hotel restaurant table. But they were serious," he says. At the beginning he didn't realize how much control Adidas would let him have, but he started popping off ideas and as they got more and more fully developed, Adidas went right along with him every step of the way.

Adidas

Initially he picked an EQT model from 1993. Right now the EQT Running Guidance sneakers from Adidas sell like mad, but when Pusha picked the silhouette they hadn't hit the mainstream yet. He recognized the shoe, he knew how it made him feel, and he remembered his relationship with it from all those decades ago. He knew customers would respond to it, too.

"When I saw that model I was like 'I know that, I know what that made me feel.' It made me think back to a time period," Pusha says. "I can think back to '93, that's tenth grade for me. Somewhere up in there I can see all of that. It's easy." He picked monochromatic colorways, white for the first release and black for the second. But this week the third incarnation of his partnership releases in grayscale and it features a different shoe. That worried him.

The sneaker he chose this time is an update of the EQT 93 that uses the same basic elements but also a lot of Primeknit instead of panels, features no tongue, and sits on a sole made almost entirely from Boost technology. As much as it references the 1993 version, it's definitely updated for 2016. "That [shoe] wasn't easy," Pusha says. "I didn't know if people were ready to take that. It was that hesitation." But as soon as the teaser images hit online fan response was swift, vociferous, and positive. "The public spoke loud," he says. He wasn't nervous anymore.

Adidas

Even using two different silhouettes over three shoes, you'll notice there is a lot of consistency through Pusha's work with Adidas. Each plays on textures from the base materials of Primeknit or cracked leather, each features carpe leather to represent fishscales, and between the three of them they're just black, white, and gray. Often when sneaker brands link up with collaborators those outside forces allow the brand to be riskier with color choices. But Pusha didn't want to go there. He didn't want his shoes to be tied to trends, and he wanted customers to be able to wear them whenever they want to. "Color goes in and out. I feel like those, any time, will be right on target"

Pusha started his relationship with Adidas by saying "no" because he wasn't sure he'd fit into the brand's context, but years later he's learned to not worry about impulses like that. "The one thing that I have learned from this whole experience is that if you put your brand into something, like what I've built as the Pusha T brand, and you speak to that person and focus on your core, you're going to have success. You will have success," he says.

The release of the "Grayscale" EQT isn't the only massive thing to happen in Pusha's world this month. He took an unconventional role in the presidential election this cycle that attracted its fair share of critics. Fans of both Hillary Clinton and Pusha T were surprised when Clinton announced that Pusha was officially involved in a Get Out the Vote effort.

Voters could use their registration as a way to get into a free concert with the rapper. Pusha launched his career off the narrative of his past as a drug dealer, so to many the relationship was, shall we say…non-traditional. But Pusha's social project is criminal justice reform by putting pressure on policy makers and the White House to get some change made. He aligned himself with Clinton, who campaigned with similar goal, knowing that they could work together if she won the presidency. But with an impending Trump presidency, and the incoming administration's expressed desires to put more people in jail instead of fewer, it looks like hope is lost for now.

It's not just that Hillary Clinton lost the presidency, but the relationships that he built over the years in his fight are suddenly without power or voice themselves. He used to know who he could call in the White House who had the same goals, the same ideas. Now, with an incoming administration that doesn't have the same priorities, there's no one to turn to.

While he was in Miami this week there was an event at the White House that he has to skip—but he sent a friend who works on prisoner reentry to go in his stead. Afterwards his friend called him to give him the lowdown on what happened. He only had one thing to say: "Brace yourselves, it's going to be a an uphill battle."

"That was it," Pusha says. "I don't got that answer right now. I need a minute."

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